Your first Zombie Film

No one here can deny that they don't enjoy zombie films, the zombie lore as a whole affects us at a personal level. I know every time I watch a zombie movie, I always talk about how I would have survived in that situation with my friends. We decide if what they did was smart, if the characters would have actually survived or not, what we would have done differently from the situation given, etcetera, etcetera.

Now, I remember even before I began watching zombie films, my friend and I wanted to make our own movie, so we wanted to know how the pros did it, the only film including zombies I had watched before Dawn of the Dead (2004) was Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island. It scared me as a kid, and I couldn't watch it, even though the zombies didn't even do anything other than walk around and be dead.

The original Dawn of the Dead when I was 14 =P it got me over my initial fear of zombies, which in turn helped me pluck up the courage to play Resident Evil 2 and the rest is history. At the time though the movie taught me that holding out in a shopping mall of all things is suicide, trying to do stupid acrobatics will get you bit, oh and of course aim for the head when shooting.

Another thing it did was make me realize my fear of zombie kids....Yeah I wouldn't be able to put a zombie kid down I'd have to run/sneak away and hope i'm not followed. On the subject of Day of the Dead that movie always makes me look away because some deaths are just that grotesque not in a i'm about to blow chunks way but jesus christ he's got his head torn off kind of way despite that I love Day especially Bub =P

@DXP Yeah, I basically had the same experience, I was scared of zombies, Resident Evil 0 was frightening for me, then I saw both Dawn of the Dead's and I felt pretty comfortable with zombies and decided to take on Resident Evil 0 & 4. If it hasn't been for that I wouldn't be here.

The 1990 remake of Night of the living dead. Its fantastic and better than the original imo. I was only 7 or 8 when I watched it and it literally scared the shit outta me. Next would have been the original Day of the dead, my second favorite zombie film btw, scared the shit out of my and my friends when we were kids. Good times.

I heard that Romero and his friends didn't know much about copywriting so the film was reproduced by different filmmakers using the same title. I never saw any of them, but I don't doubt that they were good. But even George A's famous promotional poster belonged to someone else, and the woman sued him for a ton of cash.

And I will never have low regards for the original Day of the Dead. It was the first film that made me think that Zombie movies can actually get psychological. Both Dawn of the Dead's seemed rather mindless, and Night of the Living Dead just seemed like a downward spiral of crap that would never progress.

I honestly had a bit of trouble finding my first zombie movie. I only remembered the Finnish title, "Zombien suudelma" (Zombie's Kiss) but neither of those names gave me any results on google. After going through a list of zombie movies made in the 90s I finally found it:

My Boyfriend's Back. It's a 1993 movie about a guy who comes back from the dead to see his love interest. I saw it back when I was in elementary school (no idea what age) and what I remember best from it is when a guy tries to kill the zombie he manages to chuck the axe he was swinging to his own head, thus killing himself. Then there was the kiss at the end, of course.

What made finding this even more confusing was that its original title in the theatres was Johnny Zombie.

Wow, everyone saw zombie films at such a young age… what made you keep watching the film? I know if I saw Dawn of the Dead at that age I would probably walk out.

I saw Scooby Doo on Zombie Island when it first came out and I was terrified by it, the scene where Scooby and Shaggy are messing around with the first zombie and they pop his he's off cause they think its a mask scared the crap out of me. But I honestly can't consider that my first Zombie film. They were never trying to survive and bunker down while killing flesh eating zombies, there's no hypothetical when the zombies don't even attack you. By the end of the movie I even forgot that they were apart of it, it took a sequence to remind me that there were zombies in the movie.

I think if the movie revolves around the idea of zombies/zombification, it is a zombie movie by default.

I was a wimpy kid and couldn't watch anything horror, though it still drew me to it. My Boyfriend's Back is just such a silly movie that it never got scary. I don't think there's even blood at any point, not even when the guy hacked himself with an axe. The zombie does lose parts when he starts decomposing but he doesn't bleed either.

He did crave for human flesh, though. I remember seeing a couple of dead bodies.

I suppose I just don't want to admit thy Scooby Doo was my first zombie film. I mean its that and I don't really feel that it counts. It's a cartoon with corny fart jokes and stuff. It had more to do with Ghosts than zombies in the end.

My Boyfriend's Back actually sounds like a weird concept for a movie but it could be done well, like Fido, a boy and his pet zombie sounds bad on paper, I've never watched it, but my friend tells me it's one of his favorite zombie flicks. But I'm assuming if the main zombie kills himself that just means its hilariously bad.